Other People

[Adrestia]

When I was a kid, the school system gave us four choices.
[list=1][*]white, not latino[*]black, not latino[*]latino[*]other[/list]Asian/pacific islander was added later.

Some mixed kids would choose all applicable options, and some chose other.

I never saw a box for someone from another country, they only cared what we looked like. That's why I liked the "other" kids - it was more difficult for people to stereotype and categorize them before they even had a chance to introduce themselves.

[IcePrincessKRS]

lol I remember "other" but I always checked every applicable box.

[dUSt]

I was always confused, because even though I was very white, I had the heart of a Latino, and the feet of a pacific islander.

[missionseeker]

I'm an other person!

[fides quarens intellectum]

This thread keeps making me think of something we talked a lot about in grad school: the "other." The funny thing was, the "other" always had to be in parentheticals just to make sure that [i]other[/i] people reading your work knew that you knew that the "other" is such a terribly loaded construct, blah, blah, blah.

[Deus te Amat]

I'm filling out applications for research opportunities this summer, and for one of them, Caucasian wasn't even an option. I'm very, very white, (9 different nationalities, the only one with a bit of color is Italian, and its a no show). For the first time in my life, I had to select "other". I laughed at the irony.

[rhetoricfemme]

I always marked 'other' even though I'm rather western European in heritage. Even as a kid I never understood why it was any of their business or what difference it would made. Demographics and statistics were a mystery to me, though, lol.

[BG45]

When I did my thesis, my stats guy made me do my racial categories by the latest U.S. Census forms and it caused a minor outrage on campus because like you said, there's really nothing there for people who don't fit into certain clear-cut boxes. I got called some pretty nasty things, racist being the least of them, over the whole issue.

[Archaeology cat]

Here I'm always marked as "White, Other", because I'm not British or Irish. So, I'm an Other, and I live on an island. . .

[Papist]

Now they have 'Other' for gender.[img]http://www.phatmass.com/phorum/public/style_emoticons/default/crazy.gif[/img]

[Vincent Vega]

In junior high and high school I was very involved with the science fair. Now most people have, at some point in their scholastic careers, participated in a science fair. However, upon moving on to the state level and beyond, they become much more serious and anal-retentive about paperwork and how it should be done.
When I was in about eighth grade, there was a contemporary of mine who was going also going to the state fair. We had a meeting where the regional fair director would gather all of the students (usually a shade over two dozen junior high and high schoolers) and go over paperwork. Usually people had at least a few small issues with paperwork, and so when she got to him, she told him that there was only one small error, and what it was was in the race/ethnicity box. He had checked "other (please specify)" and on the line had written:
"plain white boy".
She told that story for years to come.

[fides' Jack]

I always wondered what "Others" look like. And then I saw the movie. And now I know - they're ghosts.

[Adrestia]

There seemed to be 2 major groups that were upset by the categories: those who believed that their group wasn't represented, and those that believed identifying race was bad altogether.

Since I'm a foreigner I never expected to find the right category. First generation is a class of its own. I went to school in the USA, but went home to my parents homeland. We were always around other Jamaicans. It was literally like living in two countries, without being completely in either. I didn't grow up in Jamaica, so I would have felt wrong checking a Jamaican or Caribbean box if it existed. Black was/is fine. I still feel weird checking African-American since my ancestors didn't actually land in the USA. It was the same slave ships that took them to Jamaica, but that's where the stories diverge.

[Anastasia13]

[quote name='Deus_te_Amat' timestamp='1296665920' post='2207772']
I'm very, very white, (9 different nationalities, the only one with a bit of color is Italian, and its a no show).[/quote]
This is me, except I am a quarter Armenian, not Italian. And that Armenian might have trace amounts of Persian/Mongol, and the Armenian great grandmother lived in Beirut before going to France and coming to the US. My Armenian great grandfather was a run-away slave.